Fruit and Fish: Alison Goodwin’s Reimaging of the Modernist Motif

Alison Goodwin’s painting Cantaloupe (2008) at first appears, perhaps naively, to depict a still life of fruit and flowers on a table: pomegranate, cantaloupe, sunflowers, and a drink. Beneath two rusty red and murky green lines, a diamond pattern demarcates the floor from the wall above. Next to the mottled green-and-red wall is a view through an open window. Three narrow houses lean precariously to the left; the windows are indicated, almost carelessly, by blocks of watery black paint. Two stylized trees with foliage shaped into bulbous spheres punctuate the row of buildings. Goodwin’s particular style, with its emphasis on a skewed perspective, flattened forms, and broadly applied colors, cannot—and should not—be read as unsophisticated or unknowing. Rather, Goodwin’s paintings reinterpret the work of some of the most important nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painters. She deliberately evokes the style and subjects of European modernists such as Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. Each of her paintings recalls the implied formal tension between depicted three-dimensional space and the literal flatness of painted planes of color and stylized forms that her predecessors welcomed. Matisse, Cézanne, and others in the late nineteenth century rejected academic norms of picture making (painting realistically through modeling, shade, and one-point perspective). By revisiting these artists’ aesthetic, Goodwin complicates this historical progression and inserts her own mark onto the modernist (and particularly male-dominated) canon. [excerpt

Our So-Called Illustrious Past

I went to London not to see the queen, but to find the Dutch baronet from whom we were all descended. I went as my father and forefathers and foremothers had done, to turn the crackling pages of a parish register and put my finger on our name. I went with an image of Gualter de Raedt, a young Dutchman in 1660, boarding a ship to accompany Charles the Second back to England, where monarchy would be restored. The fleet of thirteen ships sailed from Schevinengen on a flat gray sea as fifty thousand people stood on the beach to watch. Our man, our first identifiable forefather, our target of international inquiry, entered London with Charles on a Tuesday in May, the streets lined with observers, the horses plumed with French feathers, and was created (and here our family springs into being) Baronet the very next day. Charles owed rather a lot of favors, having raised an army which he could not pay, an ill-disciplined hungry army of 2,500 men, and so when he triumphally entered London, with a detailed contract for his employ ment as king, called elegantly the Declaration of Breda, and having ordered such household necessities as a velvet bed, he felt the urgency of dispens ing honors, in some cases instead of money, and so our man became Sir Gualter de Raedt, of the Hague. Sir Walter, the family bible-keepers called him, anglicizing his name, Sir Walter Rhett. We come down from Sir Walter Rhett, who was Dutch, wrote a family historian, who was (and this part is underlined) of the oldest and purest nobility that Europe can boast. Thus my introduction to the fantasies of genealogists. [excerpt

Examination: Reflections on the 150th

Gettysburg, the first three days of July, 1863. An epic clash of titans sways back and forth across the fields and hills of this small Pennsylvania town. The two armies who fought here left in their wake over fifty thousand men broken in three days of combat, and the significance of their actions to the course of the American Civil War has rarely been doubted. The Union’s victory at Gettysburg put a halt to Robert E. Lee’s second invasion of the North, an invasion that could have broken the Northern civilians’ will to continue prosecuting the war. The crushing repulse of the Confederate charge on July 3 shattered the myth of Confederate invincibility, delivering the first major Union victory in the Eastern Theater. This battle has widely been heralded as THE turning point of the American Civil War, the battle that permanently ended Confederate hopes of victory and set the Union on the road to victory. My experiences of the battle’s sesquicentennial commemoration and of a summer spent working at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park inspired me to look deeper, however, and upon closer inspection, cracks began to show in this traditional view of Gettysburg’s paramount importance. [excerpt

The Diary of a District Officer: Alastair Morrison\u27s 1953 Trip to the Kelabit Highlands

In 1953, Alastair Morrison, then acting District Officer for the Bara, traveled to the Kelabit Highlands along with his wife, photographer Hedda Morrison, and ever changing entourage of \u27coolie porters and guides. This journey was part of his regular responsibilities as a District Officer. During such tours, Morrison surveyed longhouse communities and collected information about the local population and spoke to people about government policies, school fees, taxes, the registering of guns, and often sought to resolve local disputes. Such journeys were summarized in formal reports. However, Morrison also kept travel notebooks, which he later used to write his memoir, which summarized the highlights of his life in Sarawak (Morrison 1993). These handwritten travel notebooks from his journeys are preserved, along with his wife\u27s photographs, in the Kroch Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at Cornell University. This article is based on a close reading of Morrison\u27s Kelabit notebooks, where he recorded his daily thoughts during a one month trip on food through the Kelabit Highlands in 1953. Whereas Morrison\u27s published memoir (1993: 86-88) summaries in just over two pages the main issues encountered on the journey, the original notebooks provide much additional information

Bright Lights on Quiet Streets: Tom Keough’s Nocturnes

The well-kept city streets lined with trees and old brownstones may seem familiar in the paintings of Brooklyn-based artist Tom Keough, but the neighborhood is disquietingly empty. Keough situates the sidewalk in the immediate foreground of his paintings and compels the viewer to enter into an eerily vacant scene. With few exceptions, Keough leaves the always still and sometimes snowy New York setting largely unoccupied. Nonetheless, Keough conveys human presence in his paintings with the soft glow of lamplight from windows, footprints in the snow, and cars parked along the side. The theme of urban alienation—a paradoxical sense of loneliness felt in the midst of dense population and bustling activity—has been examined by Keough’s art-historical predecessors, such as Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and perhaps most consistently by Edward Hopper. Whereas these painters frequently employed various urban types (shop girls, entertainers, once clerks) lost in thought to evoke a sense of estrangement and inward reflection, Keough remarkably conveys similarly absorptive emotional states without such figural intervention. [excerpt

Mark Greenwold’s Excited Self

In a recent exhibition catalog of painter Mark Greenwold at New York’s DC Moore Gallery, the artist, in lieu of a conventional statement about his work, conducted a self-interview. To his question, ‘‘Why?’’ Greenwold responded: I thought that I could possibly get at things that another person might find too daunting or too polite to ask—very obvious questions by the way, that I’d probably be too thin-skinned or reactive to give an honest response to if another person asked the question. [excerpt

The Cult of Campus: An Analysis of Gettysburg College Students’ Fixation on the Physical Aspects of Their Campus

This research paper takes a critical look at how Gettysburg College students interacted with a select few areas on and off the campus grounds both in the 1920s and the 2010s. This work focuses specifically on how these interactions have changed or remained the same. The majority of research was collected through Gettysburg College publications like The Blister and Cannon Bawl, which can be found in the Special Collections at Gettysburg College\u27s Musselman Library

A Sufficiently Republican Church: George David Cummins and the Reformed Episcopalians in 1873

In 1873 George David Cummins, the assistant bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Kentucky, rocked the complacency of the Protestant Episcopal Church by resigning his Kentucky episcopate and founding an entirely new Episcopal denomination, the Reformed Episcopal Church. Schismatic movements in American religion are hardly a novelty. Still, Cummins and his movement occupy a peculiar position in both the history of American religion and the cultural history of the Gilded Age. Unlike the wave of church schisms before the Civil War, the Reformed Episcopal schism of 1873 had no clear relation to sectional issues. And unlike the fundamentalist schisms of the early 1900s, it had no real connection to the great debate in American religion between conservativism and modernism. Instead, the story of George David Cummins hangs upon a ferocious struggle within the Episcopal Church about ritual, romanism, and Episcopal identity - or, in other words, about symbol and culture in the Gilded Age. And in 1873, that cultural struggle was closely bound up with the fearful and unresolved questions posed by America\u27s full integration into the great networks of international, industrial, and finance capitalism. Cummins and the Reformed Episcopal schism was, in miniature, part of the persistent conflict between the old antebellum republican ideals of public virtue and restraint and the new capitalist ethic of consumption which restructured American public culture in the Gilded Age. [excerpt

Erin Duran, LGBTQA Advisor and Residential Life Coordinator

In this new Next Page column, Erin Duran, LGBTQA Advisor and Residential Life Coordinator, shares with us the name of the author he appreciates even more now that he knows said author is from his home state of Texas, which title caught his attention as a sixth grader (and the hit song played on repeat while reading!), and which authors he frequently recommends to students for their challenging (in a good way) discussion of LGBTQA topics